Dear ESPN: You don’t get eye keratitis from energy drinks

Ohio University journalism professor Bill Reader has students in his News Editing class submit a Catch of the Week. “Mostly they pounce on their peers at the student paper for noun-pronoun agreement errors,” he writes, but journalism senior Jordan Brogley Webb‘s recent find was “especially interesting”:

She wrote:

My catch of the week comes from an ESPN article that was published in the last week of September. The story is about Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton, who was not playing due to an eye condition. The writer lists Hamilton’s condition as “eye keratitis,” which is a drying of the cornea. He writes that the condition is caused by having too much caffeine, which is a factual inaccuracy. Keratitis has nothing to do with caffeine and results from an infection or virus. My father, who is an ophthalmologist, confirmed the error. ESPN made a very serious mistake in the story by getting the diagnosis wrong. Either ESPN did not even realize the mistake, or they thought it was too technical for the audience to realize.